How to Explain Consciousness

Abstract

However complicated the so-called consciousness problem still appears in the eyes of many philosophers, its scientific treatment is comparatively simple. The decisive thing about it is the capability to overcome two wide-spread prejudices, namely an anthropomorphic one (Ryle 1949) and a dualistic one (Popper and Eccles 1976). The first says that man alone, as a social organism with a gift for language and hence verbal communication, can be capable of being conscious, whereas the latter proceeds from the Cartesian idea that consciousness can never be reduced to “simple” material processes in the brain. Both views are equally wrong and disprove themselves immediately, since first, it cannot be strictly proved that other people also have consciousness and second, the fact that we, in the course of our lives and without any difficulty, develop the ability (Bischof-Kohler 1988) to attribute purely material processes in our environment—e.g., the appearance of members of our own species—to consciousness processes (cf. Bühler’s “You-evidence” 1922), that without the acceptance of the thesis: “consciousness is linked to material phenomena” (Patricia Churchland: “Consciousness is not based on brain processes, it is identical with them”, translated from Psychologie heute,July 1999) we can save ourselves the trouble of any further meaningful discussion of consciousness. The subject is very similar to the reality problem dealt with previously or the “direct” perception of animacy (cf. Scholl and Tremoulet 2000) which both are supposedly just as intricate, however, it is not half so difficult to deal with as Searle would have us think. If it is allowed to attribute consciousness to our fellow humans without any really compulsive grounds for doing so, but which we do everyday and every moment, consequently it must also be possible in principle to do so for our somewhat more distant relatives, which, of course, animals are. That we are dealing with material processes here is then almost a triviality. One can quite simply turn this explanatory perspective around. The precise statement of the problem, as succinctly put by the Austrian satirist Alfred Polgar (1873–1955) as long ago as a century, with regard to the animal/human comparison is also valid in the same way for the relationships within our species whereby instead of street maps and cities we can simply substitute suitable biological terms:

In the darkness of the animal soul, man shines the light that his inborn individual knowledge of the human soul has ignited. This, incidentally, as if he wanted, with the aid of a street map of Paris, to find his way around in London (Alfred Polgar).

We don’t know how it works and we need to try all kinds of different ideas.

John Searle

Oh, he is right, that popular philosopher when he says that “to be” is only an expression with marked electromagnetic-galvanoplastic moments.

Johann Nestroy